Friday, 2 April 2010

Standing prepared, empty, curtained, shuttered, tall mirrors facing across laid tables crowned by napkins, with space rocketing transparence from one glass silvered surface to the other, supporting walls covered in olive-coloured silk, chandeliers repeated to a thousand thousand profiles to be lost in olive-grey depths as quiet as this room's untenanted attention, but a scene made warm with mass upon mass of daffodils banked up against mirrors, or mounded once on each of the round white tables and laid in a flat frieze about their edges -- here then time stood still for Jane, even in wine bottles over to one side holding the single movement, and that unseen, of bubbles rising just as the air, similarly trapped even if conditioned, watched unseen across itself in a superb but not indifferent pause of mirrors.

Into this waiting shivered one small seen movement that seemed to snap the room apart, a door handle turning.

All three of these were great and were an incredible treat during our early spring drive between the Delaware Valley and the Hudson Valley today. By the time we reached the lower Catskills, the Pennsylvania balminess and blooms had receded to grim wintery damage. I first read the Samuel Beckett excerpt (which I’m going over and over as I tend to do with Beckett) and considered its accompanying photos while we were riding through Bucks County farmland. As we hit the Orange County, New York border, some geographical and topographical differences aside, the essential look and feeling were those of the County Kerry and Antarctica photos. The Larkin poem hit so close to home it’s quite disturbing, but it’s good to be reached. The passages from Nothing are just mind-blowing. It’s been a few years since I last read it and it’s on my permanent re-reading list. I started Henry Green with Party Going, which was lucky, I think, and first worked backwards and then forward, concluding with Nothing and Doting. The Winter Palace interior illustrations are perfect.

As to the opulent baroque decoration observed in the wonderful Ukhtomsky views of the Winter Palace (and also of course viewed in Russian Ark), it's interesting to note that the Winter Palace and the country estate of the Nabokov family, pictured at the bottom of the post below this one, were designed by the same architect.

A vanished world.

(Of course in the Henry Green novel, the scene is taking place in the dining room of a very posh London hotel.)

The pleasant scene invoked in this sweet comment -- "our early spring drive between the Delaware Valley and the Hudson Valley today...and considered ... while we were riding through Bucks County farmland..." prompted me to put up this.